French Politics, Culture & Society

The limited objections raised by members of the book trade to the press law at the time of the trial of Madame Bovary serve to highlight some fundamental characteristics and contradictions of liberalism in mid-nineteenth-century France. In general, liberalism in this time and place emphasized commercial freedom and property rights, at the expense of freedom of speech. In contrast to Anglo-American liberals, French liberals readily sacrificed this last freedom in the interest of "order," which was deemed necessary to promote the growth of commerce. As some of the most recent scholarship on the political culture of the Second Empire (and early- to mid-nineteenth-century France more generally) has shown, property, alongside education, was the main priority for liberals. It was only because property and education seemed to require it that freedom of the press eventually became important to French liberals and republicans. Intellectual freedom entered the political culture, for authors and publishers as well as statesmen, only through the back door of economic liberalism.

La chute de la monarchie et l’instauration de la Première République en 1910 inaugurent une période de grande instabilité politique au Portugal. La Grande Guerre, si elle y a fait moins de victimes qu’en France, a néanmoins fortement frappé l’imaginaire collectif, et les monuments aux morts sont là pour en garder la mémoire. Dans les années vingt, une crise économique et financière sans précédent frappe une économie peu développée, encore très dépendante de ses exportations de vin de Porto, de conserves de poisson et de liège.

The April 21st defeat of Socialist party candidate Lionel Jospin in the first round of the 2002 presidential elections shockingly ended the five-year reign of arguably the most productive government in Fifth Republic France.1 The Jospin government of the Gauche Plurielle departed as surprisingly as it had come to power five years earlier, its legacy of unprecedented success in Left coalition building and far-ranging policy construction seemingly voided by Jospin’s embarrassing loss to Jean-Marie Le Pen and the Far Right.

This article examines this crisis in wine production through the prism of one Languedocien village faced with a decision of utmost economic and social significance. In 2000-2001, the California winemaker Robert Mondavi tried to buy land in the village of Aniane in order to build a winery that would produce wine of exceptional quality. The Mondavi company was already installed nearby in Montpellier as a purchaser of wines to be incorporated into its own blend under the label of Vichon M?diterran?e. Its representative, David Pearson, was well acquainted with the local political scene. What Pearson and Mondavi appear to have underestimated, however, was the symbolic significance that would be attached to their attempt to purchase land in Aniane. For the land they wanted to buy was not private but communal, and they weren?t ordinary winemakers but representatives of an American-owned multinational corporation.

La guerre américaine en Iraq était annoncée, et on a eu le temps d’en parler et de lui trouver une causalité ou une finalité, ou au contraire une illégalité ou une immoralité. L’attentat du 11 septembre 2001 survint sans que l’on s’y attende, et c’est après l’événement subit qu’il fallut le penser, dans « l’inappropriablité, l’imprévisibilité, la surprise absolue, l’incompréhension, le risque de méprise, la nouveauté inanticipable, la singularité pure, l’absence d’horizon », comme le dit Derrida.

On the leaflets announcing the opening in 2007 of a new Center for Immigration History in Paris, one can read the following sentence: “Leur histoire est notre histoire: la place des immigrés dans la construction de la France” [Their history is our history: the place of immigrants in the construction of France].2 What may appear, initially, as a trivial opposition between “their history” and “our history” reveals in fact a great deal about the underlying assumptions of the project.

Why do the French appear as incorrigible anti-Americans? Why is France singled out as a bastion of systematic opposition to US policies? Anti-Americanism can be defined as an unfavorable predisposition towards the United States, which leads individuals to interpret American actions through pre-existing views and negative stereotypes, irrespectively of the facts. It is based on a belief that there is something fundamentally wrong at the essence of what is America. This unfavorable predisposition manifests itself in beliefs, attitudes and rhetoric, which may or may not affect political behavior. Is France, according to this definition, anti-American? It is difficult in practice to distinguish between genuine anti-Americanism (disposition) and genuine criticism of the United States (opinion). It is partly because of this definitional ambiguity that France appears more anti-American than its European partners. While it is not clear that the French have a stronger negative predisposition against the US, they do have stronger opinions about America for at least three main reasons: the deep reservoir of anti-American arguments accumulated over the centuries; the simultaneous coexistence of a variety of types of anti-Americanism; and the costless ways in which anti-Americanism has been used for political benefit. This article explores each of these three features in turn, before discussing briefly the consequences of French anti-Americanism on world politics.

Lloyd Kramer Enlightenment Phantasies: Cultural Identity in France and Germany, 1750-1914 by Harold Mah

Cheryl Welch L’Impensé de la démocratie: Tocqueville, la citoyenneté et la religion by Agnès Antoine

Judith Surkis Jews and Gender in Liberation France by K.H. Adler

Frédéric Viguier Violences urbaines, violence sociale. Genèse des nouvelles classes dangereuses by Stéphane Beaud and Michel Pialoux

Notes on contributors